Sleepwalking Into Censorship: How Internet Freedom Is Under Threat

In a US Court last week, the concept of net neutrality received a blow to the head from which it may not recover. Why is this important? Net neutrality is the principle that no content gets preferential treatment on the internet. All data is treated and transmitted in the same way, at the same speed, whether coming from a multi-billion dollar company or from a self-hosted blog. This idea has been a guiding principle in the development of the internet to date, but also something that a couple of big digital players have been fighting hard against. The most active of these are American internet service providers (ISPs) Verizon and Comcast. The Federal Communications Commission is the body set up by US government to regulate companies who provide means of communication to people, originally dealing with telephone companies. ISPs now fall under their jurisdiction.
Verizon have long been challenging the rules they are governed by. Last week, they won a major victory in that battle, forcing the FCC to accept that their application of their own regulations was wrong. You can read the ruling here (PDF).

The Quietus

The Black Budget

Covert action. Surveillance. Counterintelligence. The U.S. “black budget” spans over a dozen agencies that make up the National Intelligence Program.

The Washington Post

It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

"It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, “How will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?” My concern is that without serious discourse and explicit policy changes, the current path will lead to an ever more polarized economic world, with robotic technologies replacing the middle class and further distancing our society from authentic opportunity and economic justice."

MIT Technology Review

Adult Smoking Hits Plateau

One in five U.S. adults continues to smoke cigarettes -- a percentage that hasn't budged since 2005 -- suggesting that more aggressive efforts are needed to reduce smoking-related diseases and deaths, the CDC said.

Data from the 2009 National Health Interview Survey and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) indicated that 20.6% of Americans 18 and older reported being current smokers, according to an early-release report in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In 2005, smoking prevalence stood at 20.9% -- not significantly different from the 2009 figure or the rate for any year in between, according to the MMWR.

"There has been no progress in reducing that number in five years," said Thomas Frieden, MD, director of CDC, in a conference call with reporters.

MedPage Today

"The Separation of State and Economics."

Ayn Rand

Format shifting dead trees: can e-book piracy be ethical?

A question of ethics: say you want a new novel bad—really bad—but you want the digital version for your Kindle/iPad/Sony Reader. The publisher, hoping to goose sales of the book in hardcover for $28, isn't about to offer a $10 e-book version until the novel comes out in paperback. So you buy the hardcover and then pirate a homebrew e-book, which someone has helpfully made available in one of the darker corners of the Internet. Should you be fitted for an eye patch and peg leg?

ars technica

Levin on China

Forrester Says Tech Recession Is Over

U.S. and global spending on IT hardware and software will bounce back strongly in 2010, market watcher Forrester said Tuesday.

The research firm is calling for tech spending in the U.S. to grow 6.6% this year, to $568 billion, after being down 8.2% in 2009. Worldwide spending will jump 8.1% to more than $1.6 trillion, following a decline of 8.9% last year.

InformationWeek

The secrets behind crazy air-travel prices

Perhaps you've been here: You snag a flight cross country -- and back -- for just $320, board the plane and notice a bunch of empty seats. You think: How can an airline afford this?

A few months later, you repeat the trip on shorter notice. This time, you pay $1,200 for basically the same seat. You think: This airline is making a fortune off me.

But here's the thing: Airlines are not crazy. They know exactly what they're doing. They just don't always tell customers.

And to some extent they can't. The fares are so complicated, and change so often, that no travel agent -- no computer, even -- can tell you just what that ticket to Toledo will cost you next Tuesday.

"The yield-management system at the airlines has gotten so sophisticated," said Victoria Wofford, the president of the business-travel firm Tri-Pen Management. "Travelers certainly don't understand it, and the airline doesn't want them to."

MSN Money

Murdoch could block Google searches entirely

Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

In an interview with Sky News Australia, the mogul said that newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.

In recent months, Murdoch and his lieutenants have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of "kleptomania" and acting as a "parasite" for including News Corp content in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google's search indexes – a simple technical operation – Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards.

guardian.co.uk

UBS to hand over names of 4,450 clients to U.S.

The IRS said Americans would no longer be able to evade taxes so easily by hiding their assets in offshore accounts.

The agreement comes as U.S. tax authorities conduct a criminal investigation into Americans who used Swiss bank accounts at UBS to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

The settlement follows demands from the U.S. authorities that the bank hand over details on more than 50,000 customers. According to the settlement, U.S. tax authorities will gain access to 4,450 accounts of Americans who have accounts with UBS, and will drop a lawsuit against UBS in federal court demanding the names.

However, the agency expects to have access to hundreds of additional accounts through other agreements. An IRS official said the total number of names disclosed could be in the "high 5,000s."

"Wealthy Americans who have hidden their money offshore will find themselves in a jam," said IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman. "You can expect us to continue to be aggressive with institutions that are helping Americans avoid taxes."

Market Watch

The Secrets of the Temple

The Daily Bail

Secrets of the Temple

Black Swan

Black Swan - Thom Yorke

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (April 2007)

Gamification: Game Mechanics is the New Marketing

In the 40’s and 50’s, companies discovered that if they put convincing messaging in front of people while they are listening to the radio or watching TV, they could influence behavior. But as those mediums and techniques begin to fade in their natural cycle of age and decline, what if instead of getting interrupted, people get wrapped in contexts filled with game mechanics that DIRECTLY induce them to take action. After all, there is no more consistent way to predictably induce desired behavior in humans than engaging them in a a context that uses game mechanics such as leader boards, leveling, currencies, stored value, privileges, super-powers, status indicators, random reward schedules, etc. It’s like life, and we were designed to respond to these stimuli.

A good example of this is Tencent in China, a social network where many members have virtual pets. If Tencent wants to increase revenues at the end of a quarter, they simply write a script that make a large portion of those pets sick, which causes the owners to need to buy virtual medicine for the pet to heal it. Voila, a strong finish to the quarter.

MyCokeRewards is another good example. It’s a loyalty program involving many standard game mechanics, which last year accounted for an enormous portion of Coke’s ad spend. Instead of spending the money on TV ads, they spent it on getting people engaged with a virtual currency, leaderboards, quests, and each other. (Gabe Zichermann calls this stuff “funware.” It’s a good name for it. I also like the idea of the “gamification” of everything, which I’ve heard Clay Shirky and Bret Terrill use.)

Gamification is coming to everything in the next few years. The next portal is a game. The next email is a game. The next social network is a game. Your next trip to the supermarket could be a game. Your next job could be a game. That means a lot of things, but for one, people with an understanding of those mechanics and how to create contexts will be highly valued. Second, gamification is just the beginning, and will continue for decades.

So forward thinking people should consider marketing dead. To heck with cajoling, influencing, convincing, and motivating. Create contexts for people where it is in their self interest to do what you want them to do. It works for them, and it works for you. And that might be the best part of it, is that as everything gamifies, we’re going to like it. It’s fun! and taking action in a well defined context with a clear rewards structure can be flat out meaningful for people.

James Currier for Ooga Labs

The Cult of Efficiency

" Of course, we are assured by the technocrats that once we reach the promised land of Newfanglia the opportunities for leisurely enjoyments-at least in the 'long run' after all the economic disturbances have been overcome-will be immense. To the engineering cast of mind, work, any kind of work, is input only; it is the effort expended in producing output. Since all input is regarded as a 'disutility', and all output as a 'utility', efficiency consists of reducing the ratio of input to output. If the engineer continues thus to lighten the burden of man's toil, the day must dawn when the curse of Adam is thrown off, and man is forever freed from the daily grind. He need thereafter do only the sort of work that interests him, and then only when he feels the inclination. Surely a dazzling prospect for man!
But what of the innate needs of ordinary men?"

"Televised lectures would be supplemented by auto-instructional programmes in the homes as an efficient and highly economical substitute for conventional tutorials and seminars. Indeed, in view of the existing technological possibilities, it is legitimate to doubt whether the universities as we know them today, as seats of both teaching and learning, will survive the turn of the century.
Yet if people are to be taught more effectively in the future while employing but a fraction of the teaching resources required today, there will also be a loss, a loss of human contact. Just as television has already succeeded in fragmenting the family, and in impoverishing the common fund of mutual experience through which the sense of family in nourished, so also must television apparatus and the teaching machines that are being installed in our universities and our schools, serve in time to isolate people further."

"Generations have passed, and, like the woods and the hedges that sheltered it, the rich local life centered on the township, parish and village, has been uprooted and blown away by the winds of change. Today no refuge remains from the desperate universal clamour for more efficiency, more excitement, and more novelty that goads us furiously onward, competing, accumulating, innovating-and inevitably destroying. Every step forward in technological progress, and particularly in the things most eagerly anticipated-swifter travel, depersonalized services, all the push button comforts and round the clock synthetic entertainments that are promised us-effectively transfers our dependence upon machines and, therefore, unavoidably constricts yet further the flow of understanding and sympathy between people. Thus in the unending pursuit of progress men are driven even farther apart and come to depend instead, for all their services and experiences, directly upon the creations of technology."

Technology & Growth The Price we Pay, 1969
E.J. Mishan
(Joshua Ezra Mishan (Manchester, 1917) is a British economist who is best known for his book The cost of economic growth(1967).)

Children of the poor

"When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE. Science, comfort, and new things for all. Ha! Eighty Years. The future becomes now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us."
The Rocket by Ray Bradbury

From Economist.com:

That the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of declarative memory—the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to ride a bicycle.

Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.

More from Economist.com

Yochai Benkler on the end of universal rationality

Yochai Benkler:

The big question I ask myself is how we start to think much more methodically about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society. The main moment at which I think you could see the end of an era was when Alan Greenspan testified before the House committee and said, "My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for 40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong." For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.

Watch the video or read the rest of the transcript at Edge.org

RAW

Robert Anton Wilson: The Illuminati Papers as quoted by Arthur

Dissociation of Ideas, #5

Distinguish between wealth, illth, and money.

Wealth is best conceived as all the changes in the “natural” (prehuman) environment that are to the benefit of humanity and/or other life forms. A bridge that gets you across the river without your having to stop and build a raft is wealth in this sense. So is an airport. So is the furniture in your house. Think of ten other examples.

Illth, a term coined by John Ruskin, can be conceived as all the changes in the environment that are detrimental to humanity and/or to life itself. Weaponry, then, should be classed as illth, not wealth. Think of ten other examples.

Money is neither wealth nor illth but merely tickets for the transfer of wealth or illth.

Proof: if all the money disappeared overnight, the national standard of living would not change (whatever happened to individuals in the interim); things would be back to normal as soon as the Treasury printed more tickets. But if all the real wealth and illths—all the industrial plants, natural resources, roads, communications, and “real capital” generally—were to disappear, we would be plunged back into the Stone Ages and no issue of currency would improve the situation.

Note also that for all the “real capital” to disappear, all the technical knowhow in human heads would have to vanish. No economist, to my knowledge, has tried to calculate how much of our “real capital” consists of ideas in human heads (brain power) and/or of canned ideas stored in libraries or on tape. A reasonable guess is that 90 per cent of our wealth and illth consists of such brain creations.

Arthur
RAW at Wikipedia

Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice

Scenes from the Recession

Hotel property manager Paul Martinez kicks in a tenant's door after no one answered the knock during an eviction February 26, 2009 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The tenant said that he was laid off from his job in a retail store two months ago and had fallen behind on his rent payments at the low-budget hotel. (John Moore/Getty Images)

More scenes from the recession

Thanks Rich for the heads up.